Building Blocks

Building Blocks provides an option for teachers to create and cross-reference their own materials with the LNF and the National Curriculum. Teachers can link their own LNF ‘rich tasks’ to the Foundation Phase Framework and the KS2 Subject Orders.

Building Blocks automatically monitors and records the skills that have been planned and covered, as well as those that have not. At a glance, Senior Leaders have a clear picture of what is happening and where, making reporting much simpler.

Our Challenge

Schools in Wales must follow the National Literacy & Numeracy Framework in the classroom, which means that teachers need to make sure literacy and numeracy skills are developed during every lesson. Between planning, assessments and reporting, keeping up with the LNF can require a lot of preparation time.

‘Rich tasks’ are at the heart of the process, bringing together the LNF skillset for students’ continuous development. The key practical challenge for teachers is ensuring that the LNF skills are adequately covered in a rich task, and recording how well the class performed for future reference.

As the curriculum relates to a particular yeargroup, teachers need to keep records of their students’ progress through the year – as well as what was achieved in each specific lesson.

Building Blocks needed to be accessible to teachers wherever they need it, and have a strong brand identity, so that it would be immediately identifiable. It also needed to be intuitive to use, so that teachers can get on with planning lessons and updating their class’s progress. At the end of a school year, it needed to be easy to generate the necessary reports.

Our Solution

The heart of Building Blocks is that it was inspired by teachers, for teachers, to streamline educational administration in one place. We ensured that their vision was delivered in a beautiful, functional site that promotes a strong brand identity while making it easy for teachers to navigate to Building Blocks’ features and services.

As a web portal, Building Blocks is accessible from any internet device, connecting teachers with a built-in library of over 250 rich tasks – all cross-referenced with the latest LNF curriculum. The tasks come with teaching outlines and are fully editable, meaning that teachers can start planning immediately, adapting them for their class’s specific needs and recording which skills each task will cover.

Teachers can also mark tasks as completed and add comments about class progress, offering a clear sense of where the learners are in their skills. This also gives teachers an indication of how much of the curriculum they still need to teach, and at the end of the year, speeds up the reporting process. Building Blocks even saves planning from previous years so that teachers can see how classes progress throughout the school – and continually refine their own teaching methods using their previous experience.